Today, in its war on Gaza, the occupation army suffers from a shortage of personnel due to what it lost in the ambushes of the Palestinian resistance.
There is an urgent need to compensate for this shortfall by demanding that the Haredi be required to enlist in the army.
The Supreme Court decided to recruit them, and the Haredim came out in anger at the rejection of the decision.
Israel’s chief rabbi Yitzhak Yosef threatened to leave the country with his community if they were forced to implement the decision, and said that devoting the ultra-Orthodox to their seminaries to studying the Torah “gives protection to the army.”
The Hebrew media reported on 18/3/2024 that “ultra-Orthodox demonstrators are blocking the railway track in Jerusalem in protest against plans to recruit them.”
The Haredim is a radical religious current that belongs in its beliefs to the so-called Torah and ancient Jewish intellectual origins. It is worth mentioning that in 1948 this current refused to recognize secular Zionism and opposed the establishment of the state, and the reason is from a religious point of view, since in their belief the state of “Israel” has not yet come to exist.
The Haredim’s refusal to recruit their young men into the army is due to their immersion in religious studies, which are more important than conscription, as well as their fear that their youth will lose their ultra-Orthodox identity while serving, especially since they adhere to the so-called biblical texts on gender segregation and are committed to the Jewish Sabbath. By studying their Torah, they ensure the survival and permanence of the state.
Since the establishment of the state, its prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, has granted them the privilege of exempting them from military service, although conscription is imposed on Jews upon reaching the age of 18.
However, Ben-Gurion argued that the Haredim guaranteed to continue studying the teachings of the so-called Judaism.
Successive governments have already exempted them from conscription into the army and to this day, despite the law passed in 2014, the Equal Services Law, the Haredi community has strongly rejected it despite all the demands for its application to them.
Praise be to God, the Palestinian resistance is studying the Qur’an, which pushes it to the battlefield with firmness and faith, as opposed to those who claim religious extremism and study their distorted Torah, whose legends were woven by their rabbis, and use it as an excuse to refuse to participate in the war. There is a difference between the owners of the land and the true faith and between people who are bound to the land only by hateful colonialism.